Watching: One more disk of Twin Peaks episodes left, plus another one of special features.  Started on Doctor Who Series 3, with "The Runaway Bride"...not sure if that was the best start, but it was okay.  Currently half an episode behind on "Outlander"--seriously, who does 90-minute episodes?  We also watched "Guardians of the Galaxy" and "The Winter Soldier", so we're almost caught up on Marvel.  I'm still conflicted over the "Days of Future Past" X-Men movie, though.  TV shows return next week, so I predict epic falling behind.

Reading: Finished The Talisman, it was okay; since then have reread David Gerrold's Bouncing Off The Moon (second in the series; a lot of lunar travelogue, not a lot of plot advancement), read Brandon Sanderson's Alcatraz vs. The Knights of Crystallia (third in the series; still amusing, but it had some slow spots) and Diana Pharaoh Francis's Bitter Night (first in the series; kickass start and excellent tension and pacing, with the exception of one "characters captured too easily" sequence, will read more).  I also did a reread of Buffy Season 8 comics, and discovered I had the first collection of Season 9 but not more, so I picked up a second Season 9 collection today.  The plot had some serious "Oh, really?" moments in it, though.

I've just started S.M. Stirling's The Sword of The Lady, sixth in its series, and having a little trouble getting back into the series, since I read the previous book in 2008.  (Coincidentally, it seems like I may have bought it at the same time as Bitter Night...)

Listening: The usual random stuff.  Nothing really notable for new stuff, a few albums from eMusic that sounded okay based on samples (Lore, Black City Lights), plus an EP from Eliza Rickman heavily featuring toy-piano instrumentation.

Playing: On the computer, I've been going back and forth.  I had a big surge of Morrowind a few months ago, where I finished the main plot with my Character #3 (the Argonian mage, Speaker-to-Animals) but started to bog down in the expansion pack plots.  I've also just recently finished the main plotline in Skyrim for the first time (I was very close), but again, bogging down in other quests.  Rogue Legacy is good when I want to kill a few minutes here and there, and I've still got old standbys like Spider (where my win rate is about 31%, by the way), Sherlock, and Solitude (a big card-solitaire pack).  A few weeks ago I even dug deep into the past and played a couple of games of Empire--the old one, early 80's, from when it had just been ported to the new IBM PC.  I still enjoy that from time to time, even though by this point it's almost zenlike.

But if I do pick a big game to play, at this point it's like to be either Crusader Kings II or Europa Universalis IV.  I got started on CK2 a while ago, and have just finished my third game of it.  It's occasionally highly frustrating, but I love the scope of it, and also the scale, where I can get down to the level of individual people, and then arrange their marriages for them and stuff.  It's been very educational history-wise, too.  In my first game, I started as Earl Godfrey Ivaring of the Isle of Man, and followed the Ivarings through to the peak of their success, King Pridbjorn of Scotland and Ireland...and then back down to a single county again.  My second game was somewhat better--I started as Count Aner de Marsan from southwest France, and ended up growing more steadily up to becoming things like Duke of Brittany, King of Castile, and finally Emperor of Hispania...which I kept until the very end of the game.

My last game (the third, or at least the third I finished) I was trying to play in "Ironman" mode, which is a) designed to keep you from tampering with your save files, and b) the only way you can get online "Achivements" on Steam; I picked, at random, Count Radislav Kometopoulos of Dorostotum, on the northern frontier of the Byzantine Empire in modern Bulgaria.  This game also had some ups and downs--in fact, I actually "lost" at some point as my only heiress had foolishly not married matrilineally, and so my titles passed into the hands of another dynasty.  I was able to keep playing as that dynasty, though, and the Shishmans had a little more success, at one point even managing to become Kings of Bulgaria and achieve their independence from the Empire.  Being independent from the Empire while enclosed by it was a little bit stifling, though, so I stupidly decided to rejoin the Empire, even though the Empress hated my guts, and so she systematically stripped everything away until I was left with very little, and was unable to regain much of it before the end of the game.  I've just tried starting one with the "Old Gods" expansion, as Estonian pagans back in 867, but I'm still on my starting character for that one.

This being me, I also had chracter naming schemes for each game--well, for the first game, I let it pick the names for me, just to see what I would get.  But the second one, I went through an alphabetical list, first using standard Occitan/Frankish/Basque flavour names, and then using some custom ones (which is how I ended up with a King Azpiazu and an Emperor Ornigan).  To some extent I'm fascinated with the names different cultures use (Boson, for instance, was a well-known Occitan King, and "Eudes" is their form of "Otto"), I do like using my own, and I'm tickled when the built-in code for naming children after their parents or grandparents causes my custom names to be passed on for several generations (like the several Queriches descended from my original).  So for the Dorostotum game I used strictly names drawn from Steven Brust's Dragaera books, because some of them are vaguely Slavic, and I'd just been through them not that long ago reading them to Simon.  My new one, I was feeling whimsical, so, based on a recent conversation about the Order of the Stick "Polearm Shop Sketch", I'm naming my children after polearms and/or types of cheese.  (Having just finished one of Brandon Sanderson's Alcatraz books, I anticipate moving on from there to prisons and mountains when I get tired of those.)

I'm not quite as fond of Europa Universalis IV (EU4, henceforth).  It doesn't do as much on a person level, being more nation-oriented.  I enjoyed my first game of it as Castile mostly because I got to colonize large chunks of the world.  Castile ended up with most of northwest Africa, Australia, a lot of South America, the Pacific Northwest, bits of the African coast, islands in the Indian and the Pacific...  It was almost as interesting to see what other nations got.  Mexico was British; a lot of Canada was Breton (which is great, I love Brittany); Florida was Norwegian.  None of the colonies actually became independent, but then I don't have that expansion pack yet.  I never got to unify with Aragon, though; I skipped the obviously-planned "Royal Marriage" event, and I never got that good a chance again.  So no Spain, just Castile.  (Aragon didn't get any colonies.  Ha!)  I've started a second game as France, which is not quite as fun, especially since I discovered how severe an advantage Portugal and Castile have in getting a head start on colonization.  Plus the religious wars are kicking my ass, as Catholic and Protestant and Heretic armies keep rising up and laying waste to the countryside.

But then I got the plugin that lets me export CK2 games as EU4 mods, so you can basically continue your games...and that's been more interesting.  I took my Emperor of Hispania game and have been playing as Emperor of Spain, which has been fairly fun.  My Spain started out with all of the Iberian peninsula, as well as Aquitaine, Brittany, most of the rest of France, and little bits here and there in the Holy Roman Empire, and even bits of the British Isles.  I get to do the lion's share of the colonizing, because there's not even a Portugal or France to compete with.  There was Scotland, but it was mostly concerned with winning the rest of England back from the Aztecs.  Oh, yeah, the Aztecs conquered England, thanks to a CK2 mod called "Sunset Empire".  And then I ended up King of Scotland too, through a royal marriage, and now that's all part of Spain too.  So the poor Holy Roman Empire has been getting squeezed between me on the west, Lithuania on the east, and Byzantium in the south, so it's really starting to fall apart.  Flanders and Holland have been doing a little bit of colonization (as well as scattered bits like Hwicce and Orkney, but I've engulfed those too.)

I also had a CK2 game where, through the use of extensive cheat codes, I managed to conquer most of the map with the Empire of Brittania, just to see if it was theoretically possible.  I bogged down when my only remaining opponent was the Mongol Ilkhanate, because I kept having to wait ten years for truces to expire...  Anyway, I exported that map into EU4 as well, and now I'm trying to make the rest of the world British too, without further cheat codes, to see if that's possible.  It diverts me, and I don't have to worry about losing battles all that much, just dealing with overextension as I try to integrate my new possessions...